Contents

Overview

OpenImageIO is a library for reading and writing images, and a bunch of related classes, utilities, and applications. Main features include:

Extremely simple but powerful ImageInput and ImageOutput APIs for reading and writing 2D images that is format agnostic -- that is, a "client app" doesn't need to know the details about any particular image file formats. Specific formats are implemented by DLL/DSO plugins.

An ImageCache class that transparently manages a cache so that it can access truly vast amounts of image data (thousands of image files totaling hundreds of GB) very efficiently using only a tiny amount (tens of megabytes at most) of runtime memory. Additionally, a TextureSystem class provides filtered MIP-map texture lookups, atop the nice caching behavior of ImageCache.

Several image tools based on these classes, including iinfo (print detailed info about images), iconvert (convert among formats, data types, or modify metadata), idiff (compare images), igrep (search images for matching metadata). Because these tools are based on ImageInput/ImageOutput, they work with any image formats for which ImageIO plugins are available.

A really nice image viewer, iv, also based on OpenImageIO classes (and so will work with any formats for which plugins are available).

Supported on Linux, OS X, and Windows.

All available under the BSD license, so you may modify it and use it in both open source or proprietary apps.

Downloading and building the code

At present, there is not a separate precompiled or binary-only distribution of OpenImageIO (though we hope to eventually have one). For now, you'll have to build the code yourself.

Read access to the main git repository is available for anybody. Commit access is restricted to senior developers. Though you are of course welcome to "fork" the repository to create your own work area on GitHub.